This is the second in a series of eight posts detailing concepts and attitudes for sustainable personal change. As one would expect of someone maintaining a 155-pound loss for more than 20 years, my examples have to do with food and weight, but their point is to provide both concepts and practical steps anyone can take to achieve and maintain healthy change. Today’s concept: “It’s never one thing.”

One of the greatest harbors for sanctimony is when something is “for the children.” Children are the future, you know.

It’s not that I object to child protection as a motivation. I have a child, and I take seriously my role as one of his caregivers, guides, and educators. It’s going to take a lot more than me to care for, guide, and educate him, but it has to start with my wife and I.

What I object to, other than rank sanctimony of any kind, is how horribly unevenly “child protection” is defined.

So I was a guest last week at the annual two-day summit of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, and my acceptance of a press pass implied that I would write about my experiences. I guess I better get started!

I commend to you Rachel Laudan's take on that Dodge "God Made a Farmer" video that so far has retained the hold on the popular consciousness that it grabbed during the Super Bowl.

The ad is nicely done but is nevertheless a bunch of emotional hooey, so I'm not linking to it. If you don't know what I'm referring to, you surely don't care.

Thanks to Hugh Joseph and the Comfood loop he proctors at Tufts University for sharing it.

Research published in the Journal of Pediatrics says that obese kids are more susceptible to Big Food’s marketing come-ons, which should surprise no one, since they’re the ones (apparently) acting more often on those messages.

Ten overweight kids and 10 healthy weight kids were shown 120 logos, half of them to do with food, so their brain responses could be observed. From a synopsis:

I've written several times that marketing to children is a particularly low form of commercial behavior, made worse than it intrinsically is because it is so completely, so blithely accepted — to the point that such marketing is tax deductible.

For someone who regularly screeds (not a verb, but oughta be) about the evils of advertisers, I should have been all over leanwashingindex.com, an Austin-based reader-interactive site that evaluates marketers’ health claims.

Regular visitors will know that I think that write off the cost of advertising their crap on their taxes is absurd, and that all marketers are indeed liars, as Seth Godin coined it.

“Tackling childhood obesity: What role should industry take?”

That’s the headline atop foodnavigator-usa.com’s story from a panel at the Institute for Food Technologists’ annual meeting last week in Las Vegas, and I had to think, “are you kidding me?”

Utterly revolting, a McDonald's radio spot I heard yesterday foreshadows an all-family dinner which Junior doesn't text, Billy doesn't play video games, and Dad doesn't watch sports. It's as home-homey-home as Laurie David and other sages of the dining room would want it, right? But then comes the punchline: "Wait, we're having it at McDonald's?"